David A. Harding

TIL that the next generation image format, JPEG XL, is partly based on pre-Bitcoin work by Pieter Wuille (specifically, it's partly based on FLIF, which Wuille co-developed).

2026-03-30 04:12:04 UTC

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Thank you for repeating this advice occasionally. I needed the reminder today.

2026-03-29 04:54:06 UTC

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Nice! I bicycled past y'all on my way to meet family at Wailoa.

2026-03-26 15:18:07 UTC

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You all rock! Thanks to all of you for another year of fantastic contributions!

2026-03-18 17:24:22 UTC

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Rather than a book, I suggest looking for a sci-fi and fantasy book club in your local area. The local club where I live is excellent.

2026-03-18 17:19:13 UTC

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That's awesome! I love that idea.

2026-03-09 14:04:11 UTC

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Haven't heard the pod but I tried OpenClaw and was pretty disappointed. It wasn't that useful without giving it access to all my data and accounts, and I didn't want to do that for privacy, security, and trust reasons. I'm also sticking with my desktop ai tool for now and accessing it from my phone to poke projects along (I'm using tailscale, mosh, and tmux for that).

2026-03-09 03:51:17 UTC

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Been using it for six months as my main ai tool. Top uses have been for research for articles, website customization, and hobby programing. Probably 10 hrs a week, about $300 in OpenRouter credits a month.
I've looked at several alternatives and seriously tried one but none of them so far have been better for me.

2026-03-01 21:24:54 UTC

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Congrats! Thanks for helping build a genuinely useful tool.

2026-02-26 05:52:08 UTC

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I've used fossil for my personal projects in the past, it's actually really nice for solo projects or small teams. I can't imagine an agent would have any difficulty even if they had to figure it out entirely from its built in help text.

2026-02-02 23:46:21 UTC

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Yes. I also sometimes use phone zoom to read small text when I'm too lazy to get my glasses or bring the text to proper lighting.

2026-01-27 05:37:06 UTC

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Yeah, after the surprise, I realized it was probably just a link preview issue and I clicked the link. I'm not sure where to file an issue. I was using Amethyst but I assume it was just fairhfully rendering maps dot google dot com. Google was just displaying its default, which is my current location. I'm guessing its just a quirk that I'll have to get used to.

2026-01-26 20:39:59 UTC

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Was super creeped out for a moment. My nostr client showed me a Google maps preview for your link, but rather than showing me the location you pinned, the preview showed my current location. It looked like you were either doxing me or staying in the AirBnB next door.

2026-01-10 04:03:43 UTC

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I used to have an air gapped master key with a hot subkey that I used for everything besides key attestation. In that setup, dealing with any sort of tooling was a nightmare, so I gave up on it.

2025-12-10 19:43:14 UTC

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The filesystem is itself a single file.

2025-12-01 05:01:04 UTC

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What's the name for the emotion when you ask it to do something and then come back later to discover it wrecked things and you forgot to git commit the previous improvements?
(That makes me wonder if I could set up an every minute cronjob to create btrfs snapshots or something.)

2025-11-22 19:28:36 UTC

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What does "global liquidity valve" mean? Is it something like: when people have excess cash, they buy bitcoin; when they need cash, they sell bitcoin?

2025-11-21 22:11:21 UTC

Finally had my first chat with someone on bitchat (i live in an area where "region" may have less than a million people). Worked great.

2025-11-11 05:34:24 UTC

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Excellent choices! Older but still great is Star Trek II by the late James Horner at the beginning of his career; Battle in the Mutara Nebula remains my favorite spaceship fight song.
Gattaca by M. Nyman is an absolute masterpiece of subtle and complex layering; I saw on a behind the scenes that songs from it were also frequently used as the stand-in music during the filming and editing of the TV show Firefly. The track The Other Side is my most replayed song of all time.
Ennio Morricone is best known for his westerns, but I think his best soundtrack is The Missionary, in which music plays a key part of the plot. Gabriel's Oboe is a favorite song to play for a great many musicians; I've heard it on everything from sax to cello and played it myself (poorly!) on flute.

2025-11-08 02:12:21 UTC

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I use Darktable almost every day, it's excellent. I think its devs are often frustrated by it being called a Lightroom replacement as Darkroom has pioneered multiple improvements in RAW processing, from a powerful (non-ai) masking system to significantly improved color science.

2025-11-07 20:31:00 UTC

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Maybe a little bit. I think it's mostly because anti-social behavior online is often rewarded (e.g., through increased engagement), whereas offline it's often punished (e.g., through decreased engagement as people avoid assholes).

2025-11-07 20:11:41 UTC

The vast majority of anti-social behavior I've witnessed in my life has been on so-called social media.

2025-11-07 18:06:57 UTC

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Four years to breakeven ROI seems good, and I'd rather write code than do rote work even if it takes moderately longer to write the code than to just do the work.

2025-11-07 10:33:10 UTC

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About how many hours of coding in that two weeks (versus, e.g., collecting and entering documentation like you'd have to do anyway if you used a third party service)?
Taxes for me (USA/Hawaii) take me about 8 working hours a year using an online service that is sometimes more annoying than helpful and which has politically advocated for keeping taxes complicated, so I'd love to replace them even if it didn't save me a few hundred bucks. But I'm not sure it's worth more than an extra ~8 hours of my time.
However, even if I don't go all they way in like you, you've inspired me to revamp some of my personal accounting to take advantage of AI. I've been just doing the same thing I did five and ten years ago without thinking about how new tools could make my process less cumbersome. Thanks!

2025-11-05 03:22:51 UTC

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Who gave him a grant?
Thanks for making your disclosure responsibly.

2025-11-04 01:45:35 UTC

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"Argh, I'll just fix it myself!"
<Looks at code>
"This is shit code, I don't want to figure out how it works!"
<Asks chat again to fix it>

2025-11-04 01:41:37 UTC

I wish there was a way to split test my life. Today, in particular, I would like to meet the version of me who didn't try to vibe code an Arduino project and has now spent several hours thinking I was just one more chat query away from satisfaction.

2025-10-31 18:21:38 UTC

Unplanned shot. I was taking photos of surfers when I heard this plane coming, looked up, and noticed it would pass near the moon. I had about two seconds to zoom out, frame the moon, and set my focus to infinity before the plane arrived.
That it worked is pure serendipity.
https://image.nostr.build/6f8884ef7a5dbfd69a8dc007583d04d85a23fae0ba1b8796026cb861661c97e5.jpg

2025-09-29 01:23:19 UTC

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Well, yeah. Duh.
Guessing the actuarial tables say I have about 40 years left. That's an estimated hourly cost of $10 in real terms. Alternatively, assuming I have to pay upfront and if I believed I could earn a wild 20% return per year over inflation on that $2,000 over 40 years, it's an hourly cost of about $147, which is more than I should pay given my financial standing but not crazy high.
My caveats would be that I'd have to have a reasonable belief that it actually would save the time, it'd have no significant downsides, and it'd not take away one of the mindless tasks I find relaxing and enjoyable.

2025-09-26 13:31:21 UTC

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Is the implication meant to be that Bitcoin Core isn't conservative, well reviewed, and/or well maintained? If so, why do you think that?
Or is your desire to have additional implementations that are conservative, well reviewed, and well maintained? If so, do you think that's a better use of limited developer talent than focusing on making Bitcoin Core better?
When I read your post, I get the feeling that you think about "Core" and "Knots" as teams that each move with a single shared purpose, as if under the direction of an individual. That might be true for Knots, which effectively has a single developer, but it's not how I see the Bitcoin Core project, whose contributors are often in disagreement with each other (if usually only about the best way to achieve a particular goal). Maintaining that environment where independent contributors can easily collaborate, are free to express their differing opinions, and can create single-topic software forks (like PT's librerelay or the BIP148 activation client) if they feel out of alignment with the other devs seems to me like a better use of scarce talent than creating more implementations for the purpose of having more teams.

2025-09-24 20:11:59 UTC

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Never interacted with him AFAIK but it was my understanding back in the day that Luke transferred ownership of Eligus to someone operating under the wizkid nym.
A possible explanation for those tweets is that Wizkid became salty about Bitcoin after Eligus became irrelevant.

2025-09-09 15:23:41 UTC

I once read a book about sociopaths and it said that the top sign that you're dealing with a sociopath is that you consistently leave discussions with them feeling confused and wondering if you're crazy.
The reason for that is simple: part of how we try to comprehend other people is by modeling them in our head. For earnest people with straightforward motivations that are similar to our own motivations, that modeling is easy and we feel comfortable satisfaction each time our mental model helps us predict their behavior. But for people who are deranged and have ulterior motivations, developing a model is difficult (or even impossible for those of us incapable of significant malace or deceit) and we become profoundly uncomfortable when we are unable to make predictions about their behavior.
Of course, its possible to sometimes leave conversations with good people feeling confusion and self doubt, and also a lack of those feelings doesn't prove someone isn't a sociopath, but I find it useful to privately contemplate whether someone might be a sociopath if they consistently make me feel like I might be crazy.

2025-09-08 05:49:51 UTC

https://image.nostr.build/922fded3a7381b0c42adc2a3a5b8c6cc8bfa369d30ca759e5b9410d9fa12723f.jpg

2025-09-07 06:58:42 UTC

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Good suggestion. Message to her sent.
Related, I've never told you how impressed I've been by all of your work. It's been a joy to watch your Cashu work as a Bitcoiner but it's also been a pleasure to follow your other projects as a Nostrich and a general lover of freedom and privacy technology. Thank you!

2025-09-07 06:08:55 UTC

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Thanks. I wondered if it was something like that.
It would be very unfortunate if they succeeded. Gloria has done a great job as both a dev and as a maintainer.

2025-09-07 01:03:40 UTC

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I've not been on hiatus but I'm guessing this is some Twitter drama, so I also don't know what's going on.

2025-09-05 19:25:26 UTC

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I've spent way more than that on home contractors who had similar or worse literacy problems, and I've generally been happy. A top evaluation criteria for me is the insightfulness and forethought of the questions someone asks. If they're actively thinking about potential problems, I wouldn't care much about their literacy. If they're just just telling you "ok boss", I wouldn't hire them even if they had a PhD.

2025-08-31 07:15:43 UTC

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I think it's an advantage of BIP93 that it doesn't use a natural language encoding, as bech32 discourages people from trying to rely on memorization, but I figure someone will eventually make a transliteration scheme and it might as well be someone competent.

2025-08-28 02:56:38 UTC

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Why do I need to trust the relay operator? With what am I entrusting them? Is there a document that explains at least the basics of what Amthest is doing / wants me to do?

2025-08-28 01:43:33 UTC

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I would like help, yes, but not personalized help. I'd like a document I can read or a button I can push in Amthest or a set of term I can query an LLM about or something else along those lines.
Sorry my message was snarky. I gave into the dark side rather than composing with compassion. I'm very appreciative of all your work and I use Amthest because it's the best Nostr client I've found.

2025-08-28 01:37:41 UTC

Congrats to everyone who figured it out. Too bad that doesn't include me. No worries though, probably my lack of relay configuration means that nobody will see this message so Amethyst's upgrade will look like a success due to survivorship bias.
#nevent1q…6e0e

2025-08-26 03:54:12 UTC

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For anyone considering this, Jimmy was the person who recommended me to O'Reilly for the third edition of Mastering Bitcoin. Everyone over there loved him and took his recommendations seriously.

2025-08-24 16:37:15 UTC

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If the text you send is useful, why should anyone care who wrote it?

2025-08-22 02:30:08 UTC

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What is a community? (I had the bug in the old version, so I guess I don't have a community. Now I have FOMO.)

2025-08-19 03:38:23 UTC

https://image.nostr.build/1587e5047fb1d33536e1a099201b6521c9b230224779ed61aa98234676711a77.jpg

2025-08-18 02:40:11 UTC

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Rope sniper! (My neighbor is an arborist and former fire jumper.)

2025-08-17 09:20:10 UTC

https://image.nostr.build/e7bf9d29e983400b65cb73baa6da46ffedccee978f6c97a6928c151e19c9d88c.jpg

2025-08-05 00:11:11 UTC

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This is true for me.

2025-08-02 19:12:49 UTC

https://image.nostr.build/1988d9442208bb26fe4263453852ec14cfea9348b72d9d3b63fce90509964267.jpg

2025-08-01 22:45:20 UTC

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The law says they can't dump solid waste within three miles of shore. Whether or not they follow the law is unknown.

2025-08-01 18:12:09 UTC

https://image.nostr.build/ec8dd36533be7bc68282047976968f3299ba3ecd4af8c13788c66273f6166f85.jpg